Far-right City Council Candidate Masks Views
The far right is looking to sneak one of its own onto the City Council on April 6, when Ann Arbor voters will go to the polls for city elections. Michigan Review (MR) editor Jeff Muir is challenging fifth ward incumbent Democrat, Thais Peterson. Muir, who was recruited by local Republicans to be their standard bearer, takes the most extreme stands on such matters as race relations, date rape and AIDS research that have ever been heard in city politics.
David Duke isn't the only extreme right candidate trying to distance himself from his past in this spring' s elections. Muir, who has left an extensive paper trail and a record in office as a member of the Michigan Student Assembly, served notice in a campaign ad that he is no exception to this trend: "I'm not running on my record as a conservative student activist" (MR, Jan. 8, 1992).
No wonder. Muir's stands are likely to offend many potential constituents. For example, during last fall's furor over a Michigan Daily ad that claimed that the Nazi Holocaust never took place, Muir wrote: "I support the Michigan Daily's decision to run the 'Holocaust Controversy' ad" (MR, Nov. 6, 1991).
Muir is habitually soft on holocausts. Take the AIDS epidemic. In the summer of 1990 he wrote and distributed a "Students for a Traditional Lifestyle" leaflet whtch asked: "Why does ACT-UP think that citizens of the United States, the overwhelming majority of whom live a traditional, Judeo-Christian, heterosexual lifestyle, should pay (via taxes) for more research into a disease which can only be transmitted through voluntary behaviors and chosen irresponsibility?" Muir denounced U-M president Duderstadt for condemning the massacre of protesters at Tiananmen Square and the murders of Jesuit educators in El Salvador (MR, March 20, 1991).
The Conservative Coalition, of which Muir is a leader, called last fall for a little holocaust of their own, covering the U-M central campus with posters bearing the slogan "Exterminate the Radicals."
Like David Duke, Muir avoids forthright white supremacist statements, but takes thinly-veiled positions that leave no doubt about his racial agenda. His Review articles attack the university's ethnic diversity, courses on racism and minority scholarships. In one column, he described Central American children as "dirty-faced rug rats from somewhere south of Texas" (MR, Dec. 1990). Muir's encoded position on race relations is well summed up in a take off on a Beatles tune that appeared in the MR' s "Best of The Serpent's Tooth," compiled under Muir's editorship: "Hey Dude/You're so diverse/ You'd take a good school/And make it worse/Remember, when you judge by the color of the skin/And let them in/You lower standards" (MR, Oct. 9, 1991).
Muir's columns also leave little doubt about where he thinks that women belong in society. He often criticizes those who oppose sexual harassment. His MR column of October 23, 1991, decorated with a photograph of himself with two women wearing bunny ears, one holding a steno pad and sitting on his lap and the other one pouring coffee, defended Clarence Thomas, not on the facts at issue but on the concept involved: "The most astonishing bit of definitional criteria employed by the Hill camp held that if a female subordinate has been subjected to 'unwanted advances' by a male superior, then she was indeed the victim of harassment." Another column took a campus group to task for its "most sexist ad" contest (MR, April 16, 1991). Muir criticizes laws prohibiting sex with persons who are too intoxicated to give consent: "If I were you, male or female, I'd be scared. Not of being raped on a date, but of being screwed by the laws" (MR, March 6, 1991).
Muir has apparently written off most of the fifth ward's few student votes. He criticized a cap on tuition increases (MR, Sept. 5, 1991). Elsewhere, he wrote that: "Most students are temporary residents of Ann Arbor, and as such, are in a position to abuse their voting privileges" (MR, Nov. 1990).
Half of the Ann Arbor City Council will be elected on Monday, April 6. Polls will be open from 7 am to 8 pm.